When the liar hides in the phone
In the first 10 days of June, an app called "Mile Short Video" took the top spot on the Apple App Store China free download list. It once overpowered Douyin and Kuaishou, claiming to accumulate 50 million users within half a year. However, this cool "big business" is difficult to find in the mainstream media, and most people around me have never heard of it. The last such "low-key" project was "Funbu", which is known as "You can make money by walking". Last year, after gaining tens of millions of users, it was investigated by the Changsha Industrial and Commercial Department for "suspicion of pyramid schemes."
Most of the unlit currents rushed in the gutter. Qubu and Mile have similar routines, and both claim to make money without paying anything. After registration, you receive the initial task. The former requires several thousand steps a day, and the latter requires a few minutes of short video every day. After doing this, you can receive tokens from the platform, and the tokens can be exchanged for cash. A few tens of yuan-this is called "Zero Lu" in the jargon.
So far, it sounds like a new method used by Internet companies. But the layout of Funbu and Mile has just begun: if the tokens are cashed out, a large fee will be deducted, and the task will be interrupted, and there will be no chance of making money ever since. If you feel painful, there are two ways: one is to recruit new people to join, the more people you pull, the more tokens you get, the lower the withdrawal fee; the second is to recharge and buy more tokens to unlock higher-level tasks , Have the opportunity to earn more.
People with enough social experience may have realized that this inexplicable profit model uses pulling heads as the main business, and the development of offline can get benefits, and they also blindly encourage users to pay to get more returns. The skin on the Internet, then disguised by a complicated rule system, is also a pyramid scheme or illegal fundraising.
There are not a few similar projects online in the past two years. In the field of "short video" alone, in addition to secret music, there are also gospels, quick questions, wonderful notes, etc. Fun step also derives fun walking, fun sleeping, fun questioning... Eating, drinking, breathing and talking can make money. The pie is delicious and sweet, just ask you believe it or not?
The Internet helps scammers to migrate from MLM dens to chat groups. But they are still the same as traditional MLM, keen to pull the flag as a tiger skin-short video, new retail to 5G, blockchain. When authoritative media reports on supervision, the leaders will tell the downline that these "negatives" are news deliberately released by the organization to test the will and screen talents.
This is a consistent routine that MLM has used for 20 to 30 years. The difference is that Qubu and Secret Music are better bluffing people with the shell of the Internet. The app is indeed downloaded to the phone, "seeing is believing". If "Unfreezing National Assets" sounds like a dream, "Five Elements Currency" and "Good Heart Exchange" seem to be unreliable, but short video platforms are generally recognized as fashion. "Friends" also tell you that this is not an investment, just entertainment. Some media investigations found that some small cities' fruit shops, restaurants, and beauty salons have displayed short video promotion banners for Mi Le; a student of a prestigious school even found Mi Le's advertisement on the school forum.
The Internet has lowered not only the psychological barrier to participation. To join traditional MLM, you have to abandon your wives and children, and go to other places with as little as several thousand to as many as tens of thousands. Now the scammers are in the cell phone around them, and the chat group talks for 24 hours. I used to be undercover in a traditional MLM organization for a few days. The brainwashing was really fierce. Within a few days, more than a dozen "instructors" would take turns, and the thinking would really become chaotic. Now, it becomes a long stream of water in one step, the chronic poison infiltrates the whole body, and the power is still fierce.
The lower and lower threshold has allowed Funbu and Mile to further iterate the scam: you don't need to come up and pay, and you can even give you the sweetness of 10 yuan and 20 yuan first. Of course, as long as you have greed and want to earn more, you still have to go back to the old way of paying money and pulling people's heads.
Whether online or offline, the nature of scams remains the same. For the newcomer Xiaobai, it must be aimed at your ignorance and greed. Other participants are actively involved in the gambling game-even if it is the most black-hearted traditional MLM market, 3%-5% of the online can be profitable; and for the "zero-lug" project on the Internet, the investment can be large or small. There are more opportunities for profit, as one participant told the media, “We know that they are all funds. Don’t take the last stick? Just get in early and there is no loss.”
From this perspective, "Zero Lu" projects such as Qubu and Mi Le can be said to have brought the characteristics of MLM to the extreme. The entire chain of MLM does not create any value. The only thing that flows and makes the project bigger and bigger, except for the membership fee of tens of thousands of yuan, is the time and credibility of the participants. Now, even if you don’t even have to pay money, people can just betray themselves.
As for the role of the Internet? Some people say that it allows crooks to reach more people-the more the market sinks, the more poor people are easily deceived and even willing to betray themselves.
It seems like a knife, without judgment, it can kill in the hands of bad guys. This is like talking about the nature of the Internet: it used to have its own values, and people acquiesced that it would make themselves better, improve efficiency, and use it to communicate, learn, and do business. But it has become a pure tool unknowingly in recent years. Many companies try to use it to fill every customer’s time, squeeze more profits, and even directly use money to subsidize and induce downloads, and then let new users indulge as much as possible. this. The scammers of Qubu and Mile often say: Our subsidies and refreshments are the same as those of star companies. Recalling the essence, these companies have indeed "done user education" and "passed the business model" for Qubu and Mile.
Together, they constitute the latest metaphor of the Internet era: when the companies and people who manipulate it no longer have values and morals, the Internet is no longer a tool of people; on the contrary, people will become slaves of the Internet. We are trapped in the company’s carefully-developed app. Even if we don’t recharge, we can contribute our attention cleanly, and then turn it into good-looking daily activity and annual growth data in the annual report; this is actually the same way that Qubu and Mile treat us. They It is extremely efficient in business logic, and it is the value of squeezing people out. The entire Internet seems to have increasingly recognized this "cyberpunk" future.
Returning to the black water of MLM, the extremely gloomy prospect is that the old human nature problems cannot be solved, and the new tools have dug more traps. The only thing that can be counted on seems to be total external force-until the unprecedented supervision sword is swung down, these bad scams and tragedies may be repeated.
Cheng Mengchao Source: China Youth Daily